BORGESIAN OBLIVION

OBVERSE:
You were asleep. I wake you. 
The vast morning brings the illusion of beginning. 
You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters.
I bring you many things. 
The four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air.
The single name of a woman.
The friendship of a woman.
The friendship of the moon.
The bright colors of the atlas.
Forgetting, which purifies.
Memory, which chooses and rediscovers.
The habits which help us feel we are immortal.
The sphere and the hands that measure elusive time.
The fragrance of sandwalwood.
The doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics.
The curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates.
The taste of grapes and of honey.
REVERSE:
To wake someone from sleep
is a common day-to-day act
that can set us trembling.
To wake someone from sleep
is to saddle some other with the interminable
prison of the universe
of his time, with neither sunset nor dawn.
It is to show him he is someone or something
subject to a name that lays claim to him
and an accumulation of yesterdays.
It is to trouble his eternity, 
to load him down with centuries and stars,
to restore to time another Lazarus 
burdened with memory.
It is to desecrate the waters of Lethe. 
From Section III: "Waiting for the Night," in Poems of the Night by Jorge Louis Borges.

I'm not entirely sure why I've chosen a poem for a post that is long overdue. Just having finished the second chapter of the Dissertation--that too on orientalist poetry and its accompanying scholarship--I'm wondering more than ever why I'm insisting on staying out of my warm, prosy, comfort zone. Here is Jorge Louis Borges, the first Latin American writer I've ever written anything on, and the first twentieth-century figure on this blog. So lots of firsts. At the same time, I wanted to use a text that expressed seconds, thirds, repetition, the grey of endlessness, and though I knew I would find it in the twentieth century, no prose piece I loved enough came to mind. I'm such a novice here though, that the first times might win, and Borges might not have to be my Lazarus. I may have mentioned before that I was introduced to Borges by the wonderful, erudite EK, who read me "Conjectural Poem" to prep me for my first solo lecture on Dante. These firsts don't end, do they?

The untitled poem belongs to what EK and several other Borges scholars understand to be the last phase of the poet's life: well after blindness had overtaken him, at a moment when he was waiting, perhaps, for the lasts, the finals. It's not unclear in the way that it's written: Borges' companion speaks to him in the "obverse," the front, the face, of the "illusion" of wakefulness, of rising from sleep. In the "reverse," we hear the blind poet for whom the act of waking is the act of surrender to his own prisons. The most obvious contrast in these two voices, of course, is that of their syntax. The friend, or lover, speaks in positives, with the idea that there will be another sentence, many other sentences, in fact. Borges, on the other hand, drags, slurs, attempts to explain, hitting finally upon the idea of desecrating the sacred state of unconsciousness, and amnesia. I'll get to that later on, but for now I want to try and understand the nature of the contact the two sets of verses make with each other. That is to say, to they conflict, contradict, butt violently, or just converse, crustily, grumpily, even irritably at moments? As much as my soul would prefer the former set, there's an odd kind of peace to be found in giving the second situation a chance. She knows, I'm suggesting here, that he hates it. She wakes him anyway, she knows he can't remember the poetry that sustains him, so she tells him the sounds. She reminds him he's not dead yet because there is always doubt, just as there is the certainty we crave in the prose of the walking stick. And yet, she doesn't know. She's terribly outside, and he's speaking at her, not with her, and certainly not to her. She is the memories, the lifetime, the name, the person that he used to be--all of which weighs upon him in conscious moments. 

Is he suicidal, wishful of death, this poet who would much rather be in a dreamless slumber? Is there a state that between death, and dreaming sleep that we crave, or that perhaps heals us, absorbs us into a space where blindness doesn't matter anymore? Or is it so very simple-- all he wants is forgetfulness, a blankness which rids him of all that he is, all that he wanted to be, without the promise of a rebirth, a renewed existence? And is he so very strange to want it? Borges, of course, is at this point in his life dealing with the loss of his sight, possibly comfortable in the endless night of his own body. But what about the person who reads each word of the page--where does he find himself on the locus of the page? I'm going to argue here that we, or I, or you, the readers, are the space where the two speakers encounter each other. In other words, this is a poem that is not just trying, but in fact, is struggling, desperately clawing to find meaning in its two parts--the common ground between which is only possible in the mind of the affected reader. For me, surprisingly, the poem seems to be defending repetition, the mundane, the over-and-over-again. She may not know him anymore, but she'll keep at it. They "tremble" together when he is woken, as a we, not just a solitary, sleeping, blind poet anymore. To tremble, then, is to be imbalanced, to be alive, to be afraid, to feel. Fear, the most important of the lot, is the stuff of survivors. 

So many St. Jeromes...

Almost three years ago now, I got to see Bassano's St. Jerome penitent up close at the Louvre as part of the breathtaking "Titien, Tintoret, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" exhibit. In an earlier post, I wrote about Veronese's Temptation of Saint Anthony, here's another saint, one I know a lot less about and who, at least at a first glance, seemed considerably less exciting than St. A. When thinking about what text this post would be about earlier this afternoon, I did a lot of flipping of pages, some quick glancing at Montaigne's Essays, but nothing seemed to click until I remembered that my little souvenir album of the exhibit still had much to offer. As in so many of my other posts, I "read" this painting in terms of a conversation I had just today, about faith, this world, oneself, the individual, and as I will explain in a moment, Bassano's depiction of the penitent Saint, and not Titian and Tintoret's made sense.

Here is Titian's repentant St. Jerome to the left, and Tintoret's on the right:

St. Jerome's story, if it makes things any clearer, is of a man who partook liberally of the pleasures of life, repenting periodically, and then repeating the same until he took up a permanently ascetic existence, one that led him through Antioch (or present day Turkey), and then into Chalcis (or what we know as the Syrian desert area). His spiritual and physical journey was also an intellectual one, and Jerome became known for his knowledge of Hebrew, and his translations of the Hebrew Bible in Greek. My interest is in his penitence, the active regret he felt for his sin, depicted so beautifully by these three Venetian artists. Before turning to Bassano, I want to take a quick look at Titian and Tintoret's Jeromes. Clutching the stone he uses to punish himself, unmindful of the book in his hand, Titian's Jerome gazes directly at the crucifix, half-prostrated, yet unconscious of his own posture, supported by his own deeds (symbolized by the lion's head engraved into the rock). Tintoret's, interestingly, is almost an inverse--larger in proportion, agent, he holds the cross loosely, away from himself, his gaze focused directly on the pages before him. The landscape, unlike Titien's ravaged scene, is discernable; the lion is guarding, rather than supporting, his figure. Despite this inversion, however, what the two versions of Jerome share is the purpose of their subjects, that is to say, each painting offers a source or center through which Jerome repents. In the first, it is the figure of Christ on the cross, and in the second, it is the gospel or the word of Christ.

But what about Bassano's Jerome? His eyes are totally out of focus--the crucifix is well above his glazed line of vision, and his books have fallen from his lap. He's holding on to his stone, yet his arm his hardly poised to strike. The lion's head is replaced with a human skull that sits across from an hourglass, so many signs of mortality, of a worldliness that is absent from Titian and Tintoret's works. In other words, Bassano's Jerome though prepared for repentance, cannot seem to get it right, that is to say, the crucifix sits unseen, and the gospel unread, while Jerome gazes at nothing in particular, his furrowed brow suggesting a complexity of thought that cannot reconcile with the simplicity of penitence. I may be getting it all wrong in saying that Bassano's Jerome isn't repentant at all, and that he is, in fact, furiously contemplating the nature of this act of worship. He is bodily in a way that the other two are not, placed almost at par with Christ on the cross, Jerome here just doesn't get it. Yet, in the conversation I mentioned earlier (incidentally with a dear friend who has not for the first time inspired this blog) there was a moment in which the problem of reconciling faith with the nature of the world we live in now came up--how can my faith explain all of this, is the question I think Jerome is asking as well. How can the word or the symbol of faith, repentance, forgiveness, love, humanity etc. make sense in my particularly troubled world, this figure seems to suggest. The beauty of this scene, and what draws me to it, is precisely the unanswerability of the question. We can keep looking, and Jerome will not stop thinking, and we'll wait because he's on the brink of figuring it all out.

Love, and other (performance-enhancing) drugs

"From that day forward, they wrote to one another regularly every evening. Emma would take her letter to the end of the garden near the river, leaving it in a crack in the wall, Rodolphe would come to collect it, leaving a letter of his own, and always she complained that his were too short.

One morning, when Charles had gone off before dawn, she was taken with the notion that she must see Rodolphe immediately. She could reach La Huchette quickly, stay there an hour, and be back in Yonville again while everyone was still asleep. The thought of it left her gasping with desire; soon she found herself half-way across the meadow, walking rapidly, without a backward glance." (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, edited and translated by Geoffrey Wall)

There's no better text to resume after a terribly long hiatus than the most beloved of them all--Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Instead of digressing with a speech about qualifying exams, and dissertating, and the mind-numbingness of the prospectus, I might as well use the text for illusion, a favorite motif for Flaubert. I was looking through old entries and realized that I had never written about Madame Bovary, and despite having written my longer Princeton JP, as well as my junior seminar paper on this incredible novel, I had delayed making it a part of my blog. Flaubert, for all of his strangeness, was the reason I chose comparative literature; Madame Bovary, for my nineteen-year old, wide-eyed, hum-sequencing self, was the greatest prose I had ever read. Still true, but there is more to be said here.

I didn't choose Madame Bovary today because I wanted to write about the novel in particular, but rather because it floated in front of my eyes when I was thinking about a conversation I had a couple of days back: love, a relationship, romance, commitment (and other such human connections) make for a productive individual. I tried to think of characters, particularly women, from the nineteenth-century novel and earlier, who are transformed into makers, inventors, writers, artists upon falling in love. That is to say, I wanted character who become productive in a very literal sense of the word. Elizabeth Bennett didn't fit the mark; Augustine and Dante did but this is all about the earthly; and for some reason, Emma kept pestering me. Let's just say she forces the discussion elsewhere.

Reading, more than writing--consuming more than producing--this was Emma till Rodolphe, her adulterous lover entered her life. If the maps of Paris, Balzac, George Sand, furniture in Eugene Sue represent consumption through the text, then Emma's prolific letter writing, her acting out of the much-storied affair, can be read as a kind of production, in the economy of fiction and reality. I was fascinated, of course, by the second paragraph of the passage I've chosen--Emma's exercising briskly, without knowing what she's doing, in order to feed her desire: once again, consumption and innovation come head to head with each other through this relationship. It seems quite simple here, Emma is transformed through her "love" for Rodolphe, going from a vapid dreamer to a dynamic lover, an improv actress, and an increasingly better, liar, or inventor of fictions.

The end of the affair, unfortunately, also means destruction: Emma's first great collapse, though it must be noted that love itself never kills her--it's the economy. But there's more: Emma's recovery from the "illness" that follows the rejection leads, temporarily, at least, in her dedicating herself to "lavish works of charity," recycling the same words she used for her ex-lover on her "Lord." Here is a new kind of productivity, emerging from a new relationship. Her temporary fetish for Catholicism, in a kind of self and social economy, is perhaps even more productive than the one that emerged from her affair. The poor benefit; she attempts teaching Berthe, her young daughter, to read; her otherwise questioning mother-in-law is appeased. And then, her fascination with the Lord too, ends, and Leon, her new lover enters her life.

I'm going to stop here because this post could go on forever, but the point, I think, that has emerged from my ramblings is that the "love" economy is a volatile one. This isn't the most mind-blowing conclusion but what is interesting about it is precisely its volatility: it infuses and revives for short periods, ensuring its permanence, or its replication through the moment it supplies. In other words, the spectacular crash promises a new high.